The materiality of fieldwork: an ontology of feminist becoming

Abstract

Through the materiality of fieldwork at a high-achieving high-poverty high school, I discuss how the collision between practices of feminist methodology and the materiality of fieldwork forced me to rethink the “feminist” in feminist research. Using the work of Karen Barad, this material–discursive account of methodology as ontology looks at feminist research as a constitutive intra-action between the materiality of the field and discursive representations of “what count” as feminist research. I discuss “the matter” of feminist research, or how representations of it in the literature rubbed up against its practice. I illustrate how “the matter” of inquiry – bodies, buildings, books, desks, policies, theories, and discourses – was agential and affective. “Doing” of feminist research is an ontological engagement where the force of the material was simultaneously (re)constitutive of feminist methodology, theory, and practice. By engaging with these entangled intra-actions, I hope to narrate an ontological event of feminist becoming.

Keywords:

• feminist
• ethnography
• materiality

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Becky Atkinson, Stephanie Daza, Susan Hekman, Patti Lather and Jeong-eun Rhee for their feedback and support of this article.

Notes

1. This is not to say that feminist research/ers have not been invested in other types of projects. I am suggesting that those projects are not typically recognized or explicitly articulated as feminist. They still construct an outside of mainstream feminist research. See Editors’ Introduction, this issue, for further discussion.

2. For an overview of new feminist materialism see Hekman (2010) and Jackson and Mazzei, (2012)

3. As part of the choice initiative under NCLB, Columbus City Schools created a lottery process. Students who completed an application were randomly “drawn out of a hat” for enrollment. OPHS typically had lottery applications for close to 1000 students each year vying for 150 freshman seats.

4. OPHS is designated by the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) as a high-achieving, high-poverty urban school located in a Major Urban District. It has been recognized each year as an Urban School of Promise by ODE since 2004.